Ziguinchor, Senegal – Night was falling, and Boubacar Ba was once again hunting in the forest outside his hometown of Mpak in southern Senegal. Then a crack rang out, not from his rifle or another hunter. Not the Senegalese army or even the rebels waging a war for secession in the area.
It was a landmine, which blew off his right leg.
Ba tied up a makeshift tourniquet, but when he hobbled up on his left leg, he quickly discovered it was broken, and crashed back onto the forest floor.
“When someone hears these mine accidents, an explosion, they can’t go adventuring to see what happened,” without putting themselves at risk, Ba told Al Jazeera. Alone, he ended up crawling on his elbows 10km (6.2km) to find help.
That was in 2004.
The mine he had stepped on had been forgotten at the start of Senegal’s simmering civil war two decades earlier. These days, Ba walks with a slight limp, his prosthetic leg deftly hidden under his boubou and pants.
The region of Ziguinchor, along the porous borders of The Gambia to the north and Guinea-Bissau to the south, contains the last fragments of the Movement of Democratic Forces of Casamance (MFDC). The armed movement was born in 1982, pushing for the independence of Casamance, the collective of regions situated underneath The Gambia, which is enveloped by Senegal.
Peace has largely returned to the Casamance – comprising the regions of Ziguinchor, Sedhiou, and Kolda – since then. A few strongholds of fractured rebel groups hold out near the borderlands, but elsewhere, citizens mostly go about their day without a second thought, and tourists hit the beach in the resort town of Cap Skirring.
But in too many villages, mines remain. Estimates from the Senegalese National Mine Action Center (CNAMS), the government authority in charge of demining activities, put some 49 to 170 hectares (120 to 420 acres) of land, mostly all in the Ziguinchor region, as still at risk of being mined. In addition to the physical risk posed by the ordnance, the mines – planted by the Senegalese military and the rebels – often cut people off from roads, schools or farmland.
“The socioeconomic impact is real,” Emmanuel Sauvage, Senegal country director at Humanity and Inclusion, an NGO contracted by CNAMS to carry out demining operations, told Al Jazeera. “It’s affecting the whole economy.”
Reports of civilian victims first appeared in the 1990s, more than a decade into the conflict. Estimates of how many people have been killed or injured are hard to pin down.
